December 2000

In the Bivouac of Life: Longfellow and the Fate of Poetry

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Strolling around Disneyland this summer, re-acquainting myself with Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Mister Toad,
Simba, and so on, the following
reflection occurred to me: That these strange imagined characters were originally (at one slight remove, in Simba's
case) the creations of some very
bourgeois persons. Barrie, Grahame, Milne and Kipling were conventional, sober, uxorious, well-dressed gentlemen of
respectable employment and
opinions; yet the fruits of their imaginations have proved far more durable than those of any bohemian counter-culture
you can name. Not a very
original reflection, to be sure; but it is something to be able to reflect at all while heading from Fantasyland to
Adventureland in ninety-degree
heat with a first-grader and a pre-schooler in tow.

Some similar thoughts came to mind as I was reading the new selection of Longfellow's works recently published
by the Library of America.
Longfellow was as respectable as it is possible for a man to be. Writing and public lecturing apart, his entire paid
employment consisted of five
and a half years teaching modern languages at Bowdoin and seventeen years teaching the same at Harvard. He had two
wives, both of whom he adored,
both of whom pre-deceased him. We know of no other liaisons involving physical intimacy, and on both internal and
external evidence, it is extremely
unlikely that any such connections existed. He was raised in a happy family and begat another, was a filial son and a
loving father. He had only the
feeblest interest in politics, and never stood for any office. As best I have been able to determine, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow never broke the law,
never got drunk, never discharged a firearm nor socked anybody on the jaw in anger, never played at cards for money nor
speculated on the stock
market, never betrayed a friend nor made a pass at another man's wife.

Nor is it in the least probable that this outward sobriety was a lid clamped on some raging inner turmoil. I
spoke of internal evidence for
Longfellow's character — that is, his own writings, letters, recorded talk and private journals. These are
plentiful throughout his life,
from a letter written at age six to his father, to journal entries a few days before his death. There is nothing in
them to suggest any quirks of
personality more extraordinary than a mild and occasional hypochondria. (Longfellow died of peritonitis at age 75,
declining from good health to
death in just five days.)

It is therefore not very surprising that literary critics in present-day Academia, obsessed as they are with the
"transgressive", do
not find much of interest in Longfellow's life. There is no scholarly English-language biography of the poet in print,
nor has been for decades. A
list of materials one might recommend to a non-specialist inquirer into Longfellow's life and work would look very much
the same now as it did thirty
years ago. At its head I should put Professor Wagenknecht's 1966 sketch, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Portrait of an
American Humanist. (For
those who are amused by such oddities, I note that this title is misprinted as " … Humorist"
in the notes to Mr. Paul
Johnson's A History of the American People; yet another in the multitude of errors and misprints that
mar — or enliven, depending
on your attitude — that otherwise worthy book.) Wagenknecht had a gift for encompassing literary
personalities in a couple of hundred
pages; he did the same service for Poe, Hawthorne, Irving and other 19th-century American authors. Some civic-spirited
publisher could do a service
to literature by bringing out a uniform edition of Wagenknecht's little handbooks. Newton Arvin's 1962 Longfellow,
His Life and Work has
more critical depth so far as the Works are concerned; while the Life by Longfellow's youngest brother,
Samuel, gives as much as any
non-academic would want to read of the poet's journals and correspondence.

As with the life, so with the verse. Drop Longfellow into a literary conversation nowadays and you will get some
odd looks. The exchanges
that follow will include words and phrases like "mawkish," "shallow," "trite,"
"mechanical,"
"unadventurous," "tame," "jingles," "slave to conventional modes and diction,"
"the innocence of
America's literary youth," and so on. When I produced my own CD of readings from American poetry in 1999, I
included more pieces from
Longfellow than from any other poet. This, a number of people have told me, was a serious error of judgment. "Four
poems by Longfellow,"
scolded one lady indignantly, "And not one from Vachel Lindsay?" A friend who teaches English in an excellent
suburban high school tells
me that Longfellow is not on the curriculum. So far as the literary authorities of our time are concerned, Longfellow
is not merely a dead poet; he
is a dead dead poet.

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For all that, Longfellow has been a continuous presence in our language since Voices of the Night was
published in 1839, and his
lines are still familiar today, though many who know them could not tell you who wrote them. "I shot an arrow into
the air"; "Under a
spreading chestnut tree"; "A banner with the strange device"; "Ships that pass in the night";
"One, if by land, and
two, if by sea"; "Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." No other
American poet has so penetrated the
general consciousness of the entire English-speaking world. And, whatever the Eng. Lit. clerisy may feel, he is still
with us.

Item: My wife and I arrived early one afternoon for our ballroom dancing lesson. Our instructor,
a thoughtful, well-educated
man of about thirty-five, was attempting to teach some basic steps to a class of girls from the local high school, who
seemed more interested in
giggling and shrieking. When it was over he came to sit with us and, with obvious relief, watched the schoolgirls
leave. As the door closed behind
the last of them he turned to us with an expression of mock desperation and recited through clenched teeth the first
stanza of "The Children's
Hour":

Between the dark and the daylight,
When night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the children's hour.

Item: Reviewing a book by Amitai Etzioni, guru of the "communitarian" movement, for a
political magazine a year or
so ago, it occurred to me that many of the author's prescriptions depended on our being able to recapture the social
habits and attitudes of an
earlier time, and that it was unlikely we could do this because, as we say nowadays, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
Seeking for an apt way to
phrase the thought in context, I recalled some lines from "The Golden Milestone", which served my purpose
very well:

We may build more splendid habitations,
Fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures,
But we cannot
Buy with gold the old associations!

These items bring to mind a word Samuel Longfellow uses somewhere in respect of his brother's verse:
serviceable. You can bring out
Longfellow's lines and use them in all kinds of circumstances. He had a knack for expressing commonplace thoughts very
memorably.

It is an interesting question why poets of our own time cannot do this. It may be that we have a very limited
requirement for such
serviceable lines and that the nineteenth century supplied all we need. Much more likely, in my opinion, it is
because modern poets are
intellectuals, who are expected to have some well-turned ideas about form, system, method and of course politics; and
that this precludes them from
having commonplace thoughts, or from being willing to express such thoughts in verse.

Longfellow was the very opposite of an intellectual. This might seem an odd thing to say about a man who spoke
numerous languages and served
on the faculty of Harvard University for seventeen years; yet it is certainly true. To anyone immersed in the literary
culture of the present day,
Longfellow's utter lack of interest in criticism — much less "critical theory"! — or in
abstract systems of any kind,
must be astounding. "What is the use of writing about books?" he asked in 1850, "excepting so far as to
give information to those who
cannot get the books themselves?" Oh, dear. Nor was this just writer's pique at negative reviews, which he took in
his gentlemanly stride. Of
Edgar Allan Poe's often scathing remarks about his work, he said only: "The harshness of his criticisms, I have
never attributed to anything
but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong." (Which also happens to wrap
up in one sentence an
extraordinary amount of insight into Poe.)

Similarly with religion and politics. Longfellow had the typical middle-class American horror of strong
opinions. Though deeply religious, he
had no patience with theological doctrine, and probably could not understand it. The author of Poems on
Slavery was, says Wagenknecht,
antislavery but not abolitionist. When he associated with abolitionists he felt "like Alfred among the
Danes". There is an entry in his
journal that is pertinent here. On November 27th 1861 he records: "George Sumner and Mr. Bakounin to dinner. Mr.
B. is a Russian gentleman of
education and ability … An interesting man." This was, of course, the great anarchist and
revolutionary Michael Bakunin, the
familiar of Marx, Proudhon and Alexander Herzen; but what Longfellow found interesting was Bakunin's narration of his
adventures and escapades,
not — or at any rate, not worth recording — anything he might have said about class struggle or
the specter haunting Europe.

Though Longfellow was an extremely intelligent man — he was Bowdoin's Professor of Modern Languages
at age 22 — as a
creator of verse, he was an idiot savant. The stuff just bubbled up out of him unpredictably. He could not explain it
and had no real theory of
poetic composition. "The Arrow and the Song" was jotted down one Sunday morning before church; "The
Wreck of the Hesperus" was
written at one sitting. He could not write vers d'occasion and usually begged off requests to do so; the
elegantly beautiful "Morituri
Salutamus" is almost the lone exception. The history of his life as a poet contains strange pauses and spells of
sterility; between the ages of
19 and 30, usually a poet's prime years, he seems to have produced no verse at all.

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The even tenor of Longfellow's life was punctuated by two tragedies: the death of his first wife, and the death
of his second. The first of
these, awful as it must have seemed at the time (and cold-hearted as it seems to say so, for which I apologize) was the
lesser of the two. It
occurred in Rotterdam in 1835, while Longfellow was travelling in north Europe to improve his German, prior to taking
up the Harvard post. Mary
Longfellow suffered a miscarriage and died a few weeks later from a consequent infection. They had been married just
over four years. Mary
Longfellow was a great beauty; but whether she was the right wife for a man as intensely bookish as Longfellow has been
doubted. We cannot know the
inner truth of the matter because Longfellow burned her journals after her death, together with love letters the two of
them had exchanged. It is
possible that Longfellow had found, like Mr. Palmer in Sense and Sensibility, that "through some
unaccountable bias in favor of beauty,
he was the husband of a very silly woman."

Be that as it may, Longfellow's grief cannot be doubted. He was not incapacitated by it, though, and continued
his travels in Germany and
Switzerland. In that latter country, just eight months after Mary's death, he met and fell in love with Fanny Appleton,
who would eventually, after
a long and frustrating courtship, become his second wife. Longfellow was, in fact, capable of a certain detachment from
his own emotions, like those
of us who can remain perfectly clear-headed as to what is going on around us even when seriously drunk. Travelling
through the Tyrol in the weeks
following Mary's death, he was overwhelmed with sadness; but not so much so as to blame the mountains. Those gloomy
impressions arose, he
understood, from "my sick soul." Ever the humanist, Longfellow knew man to be the measure of all things. His
firm, placid nature could
take its own temperature to within a degree or two.

Mary Longfellow's death was within the scope of afflictions one might reasonably expect to suffer in the days
before modern medicine. Grief
was appropriate, and in this case sincere; but death was all around, and it was unusual in Longfellow's time for anyone
to be long derailed by the
death of a loved one. (By coincidence, Longfellow's brother-in-law died of typhus two weeks before Mary.) A few years
ago I took an elderly female
relative for a trip back to her home town in the west midlands of England. In her youth this lady had been in love with
a boy who had died suddenly
from rheumatic fever. As we drove past a small street of old houses, she sat up against the window and said: "Oh!
That's where we went to buy
black for Jack Morgan." In England in the 1920s, apparently, every small town had a store where you went to
"buy black" —
that is, funeral clothes and veils. These were specialty stores, selling nothing else; demand was steady.

The death of Longfellow's second wife was an event of a different order. It might fairly, though again somewhat
cruelly, be said that all the
misfortune of a normal life was packed into a few moments of July the ninth, 1861. On that day Fanny Longfellow was
sitting in the library with her
two youngest daughters, ages 5 and 7, sealing up small envelopes of their curls, which she had just cut off. A match
fell on Fanny's light summer
dress, which burst into flames. Screaming, Fanny ran into the adjoining study, where her husband was taking a nap. He
tried to stifle the flames,
using a rug and his own body, but succeeded only after burning himself badly. Fanny died after a night of agony.
Longfellow, 54 years old, was
plunged into an intense grief from which he never truly recovered. It was months before he could even speak of the
event, and then he could speak
only obliquely. At length he took refuge in work, taking up his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy; a task
he had begun some years before
but laid aside.

These two life events, when they had been completely absorbed, produced two of Longfellow's finest poems. Taking
the "water cure"
at the German spa of Marienberg in August of 1842, his thoughts turned to the fact of his being half-way through the
allotted seventy years of life.
These meditations brought forth a wonderful sonnet, "Mezzo Cammin", in which is imbedded a single, brief but
unmistakeable reference to
Mary, dead nearly seven years at this point:

But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet.

The grief that followed Fanny's death was much more massive, and took correspondingly longer to work itself
through into art. On the
eighteenth anniversary of that death in 1879, Longfellow, alone in his chamber, happened to be looking over an
illustrated book of western scenery.
The book included a picture of a mountain on whose side the snow lies in two long furrows to make the image of a vast
cross. The image stayed with
him, and when, that night, sleepless, he gazed at Fanny's portrait on the wall, the two things came together in his
last, most heartbreaking sonnet,
"The Cross of Snow":

… and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose …

(There is a sad little anthology to be made of poems written by men in memory of a dearly-loved wife, though
perhaps nobody could bear to
read it all through. Milton's "Methought I saw my late espoused Saint" leads the field, of course; but Dante
Gabriel Rossetti's memorials
to Lizzie Siddal are also very fine; as too, from a very different time and place, is Yuan Zhen's "Elegy", of
which there is a moving
translation in Witter Bynner's The Jade Mountain. No doubt there are many others I have forgotten or am
ignorant of.)

"Mezzo Cammin" and "The Cross of Snow" illustrate the fact that Longfellow, whom we
associate mainly with the ballad and
narrative epic, was also a sonneteer of genius. This is not much appreciated. Robert Nye, for example, in his anthology
The Faber Book of
Sonnets includes only four by Longfellow: "Chaucer," "The Cross of Snow," "Autumn,"
and "Divina
Commedia." This is a disgraceful under-representation — Ezra Pound has six poems in the book! The
inclusion of the over-wrought
"Autumn" and the omission of "Mezzo Cammin" are both equally inexplicable.

This new Library of America edition includes 52 sonnets, if I have not miscounted, and no more than a dozen are
duds. All, by the way, are in
the Petrarchan form; Longfellow seems not to have attempted the "English" sonnet. The literary ones are quite
well known, I think, at
least the ones on Dante and The Divine Comedy, and the flawless one on Chaucer: "An old man in a lodge
within a
park …" The one on Shakespeare would be first-rate if Longfellow had not put the word
"Musagetes" into the last line,
driving everyone except Hellenists and balletomanes to their reference books.

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Here are some lines of Longfellow's that you have probably never read. They are not especially distinguished
lines, and I choose them for
just that reason. They close the finale of "Tales of a Wayside Inn" (which, by the way, is very rewarding to
read in its entirety).

Perchance the living still may look
Into the pages of this book,
And see the days of long ago
Floating and fleeting to and fro,
As in the well-remembered brook
They saw the inverted landscape gleam,
And their own faces like a dream
Look up upon them from below.

What can we say about these lines, 137 years later? Well, two interesting things: one, that they would still
give pleasure to a lot of people,
and two, that no poet would think of publishing such lines nowadays.

Here we have bumped up against one of the great conundrums of our time: Whatever happened to popular poetry?
Longfellow was one of the
so-called "fireside poets" of the nineteenth century. Huge numbers of ordinary people all over the
English-speaking world read him with
great enjoyment. His brother relates the following story from the poet's last visit to England in 1868:

Upon his arrival the Queen sent a graceful message and invited him to Windsor Castle; but he told me no
foreign tribute touched him
deeper than the words of an English hod-carrier, who came up to the carriage-door at Harrow and asked permission to
take the hand of the man who had
written The Voices of the Night.

My own mother, the daughter of an English coal-miner, left school at age 14 to go into domestic service. Yet she
could recite
"Excelsior" all the way through; and if she came to my room and found it a mess she would say: "It looks
like the wreck of the
Hesperus in here!"

Why does no American poet later than Frost give such widespread pleasure, or inspire such allegiance from
nonliterary people? We are not
unwilling to write poetry. Any magazine editor will tell you that the the nation teems with poets. Nor are we unwilling
to read it. There is a good
market for books of poetry. Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf" is a best-seller, Amazon sales rank 433.
Even current poetry sells
well: The Best American Poetry 2000 has Amazon rank 4,555, a very respectable showing. (Though this needs some
discounting, as a book of
this sort will be bought up in bulk by schools and colleges.)

And yet, whenever you actually hear someone quote poetry, it is always something old. I feel sure that whole
days go by when no mouth
anywhere in the United States spontaneously, in a non-pedagogical context, quotes any line from any American poem later
than Frost's "Stopping
by Woods" (1923). Ask any well-educated, but not particularly literary, friend to quote four lines by a living
poet. Now ask your dentist, your
mechanic, your plumber. You will be lucky to get anything but blank looks and shrugs.

It is hard to blame the poets. I happen to believe that the Modern Movement was all a ghastly mistake, like
communism; and that, as with
communism, it will take a century or so to clean up the mess. Now, there can be no forgiving Lenin; but what were poets
supposed to do —
go on turning out copies of "Snow-Bound" or A Shropshire Lad? Lapse back into heroic couplets? In
art and literature, new things
must be tried, old habits challenged, eggs broken in the hope of making omelettes. It is just our bad luck that none of
the things tried in the
twentieth century worked very well, that the omelettes were all inedible.

In particular, of course, free verse did not work very well. Personally I am not a purist about this, as for
example was G.K. Chesterton:
"Free verse? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'!" I think free verse can
occasionally be very striking. Any
comprehensive anthology of good poetry will include some free-verse pieces (my own CD has five per cent, which I think
is about right). The trouble
is that there is far too much of it about, and people have been led to believe that fundamental poetic skills are not
very important, or even that
they are altogether unnecessary.

In the early 1980s I taught a college course in poetry, using the second edition (1965) of C.F. Main and Peter
Seng's Wadsworth Handbook
and Anthology, an excellent text for that purpose. I lost the book somewhere on my subsequent travels, but three
or four years later decided to
buy another copy, and duly did so. By this time the book had advanced to a fourth edition (1978), and I was dismayed to
see that the lessons on
scansion, which in the second edition were part of the main text, in the fourth had been relegated to an appendix!
Probably they have been dropped
altogether by now.

Here are some lines from a collection titled The George Washington Poems, by Diane Wakoski, published
1967.

George Washington, your name is on my lips.
You had a lot of slaves.
I don't like the idea of slaves. I know I am
a slave to
too many masters, already

If this is poetry, what is not poetry? One thinks of Doctor Johnson's reply when asked if he thought any man
could have written Macpherson's
Ossian: "Yes, Sir, many men, many women, and many children." When an impressionable young person is
told that this is poetry, and
that the kind of gassy drivel extruded by Maya Angelou at the first Clinton inauguration is also poetry; and when that
young person furthermore
learns that Ms. Wakoski is actually a full-time professional poet, who makes a decent middle-class living at it, and
that Ms. Angelou has even got
modestly rich from her vaporings, then that young person's attitude to poetry has been corrupted.

Free verse is not the whole of the problem, though. Even in the coldest depths of the free-verse nuclear winter,
around 1970, plenty of
dedicated poets were still writing formal, structured verse. Elizabeth Bishop's perfect little villanelle "One
Art", for
example — sufficiently well known, at any rate among literary types, to have generated at least one good
parody — was written
in 1975. Richard Wilbur, John Hollander and many others produced, and are still producing, verse in traditional forms.
The late 1970s in fact saw
the birth of the so-called "New Formalism," in which a whole tribe of younger poets committed themselves to
working with rhyme, meter and
traditional structures. By the late 1980s these traditionalists had made enough noise to provoke a counter- (perhaps I
mean counter-counter-)
revolution. The aforementioned Ms. Wakoski's famous broadside "The New Conservatism in American Poetry" (in
American Book Review,
May-June 1986) pretty much said that anyone who wrote formal poetry was a fascist. With Hollander she went further,
calling him "Satan".
Hollander's own views on the matter, which are irenic and accommodationist, can be inspected in his introduction to
The Best American Poetry
1998.

Across the pond, formal verse has had more mainstream support. In London, Auberon Waugh's Literary
Review has for 15 years been
running a monthly poetry competition whose rules stipulate that entries must rhyme, scan and make sense. Regular
compilations of the best entries
appear in book form and can be got from Waterstone's (search on "Literary Review"). The London
Spectator ceased accepting poetry
submissions at all some years ago on the grounds that none of the work submitted was any good. The outcry was, they
report, "less than
deafening." They have recently reversed this policy. In a stirring editorial in the September 23rd 2000 issue they
announced that they had
hired a poetry editor. "He has a beard. … He knows the difference between a tribrach and a
molossus …" Their
requirements are less strict than Mr. Waugh's, insisting only that poems scan, have an argument, and show decorum.

And of course, The New Criterion deserves an honorable mention in this context. Still I doubt any of it
will make much difference. I
have read the New Formalists with painstaking attention. (Rebel Angels, edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason,
Story Line Press, 1996, is a
representative collection.) I have been a Literary Review subscriber since their first issue. I applaud what
these poets are doing and am
very glad they are doing it; but I can't remember a line of their stuff, though I have sincerely tried.

Probably the dropping of dead languages from ordinary education is part of the problem. Translation into and out
of Greek and Latin provided
our forefathers with a gruelling but effective training in the mechanisms of poetry. Kingley Amis remarks in the
introduction to his Popular
Reciter that as a student in an ordinary English secondary school before World War Two he was often assigned such
tasks:

… an exercise that gives you an insight hard to achieve by other means: the fact, noted by
my fellows and me, that Mrs.
Hemans's "Graves of a Household" went into Latin elegiacs with exceptional ease encourages a second look at
that superficially superficial
piece.

The 1930s seem like an awfully long time ago here. Fifty years earlier, Samuel Longfellow was boasting that the
opening words of his
brother's "Evangeline" were by then as familiar as "Mênin áeide, theá," or
"Arma virumque cano".
That assertion is, of course, just as true today, though in a depressingly different sense.

The more I think about this, the more I come to believe that there is some great mystery here. It's not
anybody's fault; it's just something
in the air. Something, undoubtedly, that, if we could understand it, would explain the related fact that when, at
random, I switch on a
serious-music radio station, nine times out of ten the music being played will have been composed before World War One;
or that, when I buy an opera
on CD, or steel myself to assault the logistical obstacles involved in going to see an opera at Lincoln Center
(transport, baby-sitters, getting a
ticket), it is never for any work later than Turandot (1926).

Whatever the explanation, it is a plain fact that poets like Longfellow attained a breadth and durability of
appeal that modern poets, for
all their writer-in-residence sinecures and Pulitzer Prizes, can only dream of. A common fixture in American homes of
all classes during the middle
of the twentieth century was Hazel Felleman's 1936 anthology The Best Loved Poems of the American People. Here
are all the hoary verses and
song lyrics our parents and grandparents knew, of quality high, low and desperate: "Casabianca," "The
Sidewalks of New York,"
"Solitude," and so on. Doubleday have recently re-issued the book and it seems to be doing well; the Amazon
sales rank is 46,771. This
ranking — I believe I am on firm ground in saying this — owes nothing whatever to assistance from
our educational
institutions.

By way of comparison, here are some other Amazon rankings for poetry: Ezra Pound's Selected Poems
59,457, Rebel Angels
140,602, Diane Wakoski's Emerald Ice 247,201 and Rita Dove's Grace Notes 294,335. The Top 500
Poems, a popular recent
anthology of what it claims to be "the most anthologized poems," ranks 84,437. Its poets are arranged in
chronological order by birth date
from John Skelton to Sylvia Plath; John Keats falls precisely in the middle of the book, and is therefore the median
poet of popular enthusiasm, so
far as birth order is concerned. Sylvia Plath was born in 1932.

This new Longfellow edition reminds us that there are smaller losses within the larger. Even more thoroughly
than we have lost popular poetry,
we have lost narrative poetry. I am sure there must be many people of the older generation who can still recite
"The Wreck of the
Hesperus" or "Paul Revere's Ride"; but who now reads the long ones: "Evangeline," "The
Courtship of Miles
Standish," and "Hiawatha"? If you raise the question, people laugh and say: "Nobody has time for
that kind of thing
nowadays."

This is just not true. I declaimed "Miles Standish" out loud at a leisurely pace, pausing now and then
to look things up, in one
hour and 29 minutes — much less time than it takes to watch the average movie. Silent reading would be
faster. I am sure that anyone who
cared to could get through "Evangeline" in an hour and a quarter. You could probably read both poems in the
time it takes to watch The
Patriot (165 minutes). Even "Hiawatha" could be traversed between dinner and bed-time by anyone who set
himself to it.

So why are we all — I include myself here — willing to do the one thing but not the
other — watch a
165-minute movie but not, unless paid to do so, read an 89-minute story in dactylic hexameters? Longfellow's epics are
much more authentic than Mel
Gibson's; though it is interesting that the portrait of American Indians as seen through white men's eyes in
"Miles Standish" is so
different from the one in the earlier Indian-viewpoint "Hiawatha." There the Indians are noble savages with a
rich oral culture; in the
later "Miles Standish" they are treacherous, boastful and cruel. This latter portrayal accords much better
with the accounts we have from
people who actually lived among New World aborigines: W.H. Hudson in Green Mansions, for example, or the
memoirs of Kit Carson. The other is
much closer to modern sensibilities. This, of course, will not help "Hiawatha" become known again.

I can testify that in England, at any rate, narrative verse was still popular as late as the mid-1960s, when Stanley Holloway's reading of Marriott
Edgar's "The Lion and Albert" was a staple of radio request programs. In this little classic of narrative light verse, recited on English vaudeville
stages as an unaccompanied poem, and immortalized thus on disc by Holloway (he was Audrey Hepburn's father in the movie of My Fair Lady), the
Ramsbottom family — Ma, Pa and little Albert — take a trip to the zoo. While his parents' backs are turned, little Albert teases the
lion by pushing a stick into its ear. The lion responds by swallowing Albert whole. The sorry tale proceeds:

Then Pa, who had seen the occurrence,
And didn't know what to do next,
Said "Mother! Yon lion's 'et Albert,"
And Mother said "Well, I am vexed!"

… a stirring example of British sang-froid. Well, it isn't Longfellow; but it is certainly narrative verse — it is in
The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse!

Yet again, one knows without trying that any attempt to revive interest in narrative verse would be futile. We do not read as our grandfathers read; we
do not hear as they heard.

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Much less to be regretted is the change in taste that has made Longfellow's prose unreadable. Perhaps
"unreadable" is over-stating
things somewhat; as a conscientious reviewer, I actually did read Longfellow's short novel Kavanagh all the
way through — it is
included in its entirety in this Library of America edition. What stuff! I would have been better employed in
back-washing my sump pump. Longfellow
himself seems to have been aware of his failings as a prose writer, and after Kavanagh attempted no more.

I wonder why Mr. McClatchy included the whole of this sorry piece, when he might have given us more of
Longfellow's translations. In addition
to three page-length extracts from The Divine Comedy, he has chosen just twelve poems translated from other
languages; twice that number
would not have been too many. Longfellow was a gifted linguist. He learned French, Spanish, Italian and German to a
good degree of reading
competency — we have independent confirmations of this — in 9, 9, 12 and 6 months, respectively,
between 1826 and 1829. Much
of the rest of his life was devoted to enlarging his knowledge of the literature in these tongues, and in acquiring
others. He was a busy and
skillful translator of poetry from, by Arvin's count, eleven different languages altogether.

The translating of poetry is an oddly addictive business, as anyone that has tried it will confirm. Longfellow
found it intensely
stimulating — "Like running a ploughshare through the soil of one's mind," he told his friend
Ferdinand
Freiligrath — and gave himself over to it with a passion. The results on display in this edition range from
a grave and fine-wrought,
almost Shakespearean, rendering of one of Michelangelo's sonnets for Vittoria Colonna to the following irresistible
little carved cherry-stone
titled "A Neapolitan Canzonet."

One morning, on the sea-shore as I strayed,
My heart dropped in the sand beside the sea;
I asked of yonder mariners, who said
They saw it in thy bosom, — worn by thee.
And I am come to seek that heart of mine,
For I have none, and thou, alas! hast two;
If this be so, dost know what thou shalt do? —
Still keep my heart, and give me, give me thine.

Amongst other reasons for wishing there were more translations here, I note that four of the twelve are love
poems, a genre the poet himself
ventures into, unaccompanied, just once in the whole of the rest of the book. Longfellow could translate love poetry
very effectively, but he could
not write it, and seems to have known this. That single solo venture is "The Evening Star", addressed to
Fanny shortly after their
marriage. It strikes me — I think it must strike any modern reader — as decidedly peculiar.

Setting to one side the small differences of opinion registered above, I believe that Mr. McClatchy and the
Library of America have done a
fine job with this little volume. We cannot, indeed, buy with gold the old associations; but anyone that cares to do so
can settle down with this
Longfellow and find some familiar lines in their native habitat, or make the acquaintance of some beautiful sonnets, or
perhaps even discover a
taste for narrative verse. Longfellow will never again be as much loved, prized and memorized as he was in 1850, or
even 1950; but when you read him
at his best — the sonnets and short ballads, the translations, "The Building of the Ship," "A
Psalm of
Life" — you know that this is the real stuff — "the true, the blushful
Hippocrene." The United States has not
engendered so many first-rank poets that we can afford to neglect one.